


Falling

by Marlena_Owens



Category: Harlots (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-23 05:04:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20002780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marlena_Owens/pseuds/Marlena_Owens
Summary: What I imagine to be Nancy's initial reaction to the last 2 minutes of S3E3, provided she is still in the area.Major plot spoilers!





	Falling

She was living. 

Brilliant light blues and sparkling magentas breezing through her mother's cocked-up plan that was not a plan. 

Beautiful white teeth experienced in the arts of both suckling and heckling. Blinding crowds of 100 or just one with each smile and demanded price. 

Make-up applied in a rare moment of care mussed by the thousands of moments of carelessness beginning soon after application and snowballing into now. 

Striking black hair equally dishevelled, but done up in a beautiful mound of curls and waves to frame her blushing, red cheeks. Cheeks always flushed with emotion. 

Her eyes, ever-filled with cunning and romance, faithfully betrayed every specific emotion with the open vulnerability possessed by only the young. 

She was so young. She cared not, for she believed her feelings mattered. Continued to trust in them and follow them blindly down any road that felt good in that moment. 

The road to here and now. 

Now the gown crumples over her colorless frame with a garish contrast that Nancy finds sickening.

Her pale lips expose a set of teeth that will never again smile, all of the color having drained out in the pool of the unfairly colorful blood that halos her head. 

Makeup suddenly crude and false. Impossible pinks and purples failing to conceale just how dead Charlotte's skin looks. 

Nancy suddenly feels light-headed. Her chest is tightening. It's as if someone's kicked her in the back and knocked the wind out of her ribcage. 

Charlotte's hair has become matted with blood in the impossibly short amount of time that elapsed between the moment of impact, discovery, reaction, and Nancy's ability to fight her way to the front of the crowd. 

"Ye I be little, I be full of might... or summat," she muses in a moment of unreal sanity. She figured the birch rod helped, too, in addition to her might. 

The eyes are open, with a drying tear in the corner of one. There is no intelligence there anymore. Nancy searches for any betrayal of a parting thought or glimpse of an ever-after, but wherever Charlotte Wells's spirit lies, it isn't here. Not anymore. 

Suddenly gravity pulls out from underneath Nancy and she muses that it isn't at all an unpleasant sensation. 

She realizes with horror that for every dumb decision forever-young Charlotte made, Nancy had the opportunity to be an adult and stop it. 

Had she not, in the span of the last three hours, provided her fugitive, dead (but not really dead, she thinks with a sudden dry irony) friend with the transportation, costuming, inside knowledge, and bloody entrance fee to boot to carry out an insane plan? 

Had Nancy Birch not, in fact, assisted in drawing dear Charlotte, yet again, into one of Margaret Wells's bad damn plans? 

Nancy would have thought more about it. About her hate for Margaret that constantly competes with a love and devotion so deeply entrenched within her core. About all of her own decisions leading up to this moment. About all of it. 

But she was here and now. 

And now she was falling, falling, falling into her own sort of blackness. 

Nancy falls with the knowledge that at least one will awaken in a few hours.

Because one fell from 50 feet. 

The other is falling from five feet.


End file.
